From saffron to heirloom corn tortillas and really, really good grits—we've got just the place.

Once upon a time in a pre-kale era, before we were mixing miso into our pastas and topping our toast with kimchi, iceberg was the standard lettuce and fresh ginger was nowhere to be seen (or so says my mother, local expert on the evolution of the market). American grocery stores today are better than ever. You can find artisanal flour, fresh turmeric, and premium fish sauce at your local Whole Foods or high-end market.

Yet, even as cooks and store selections have become more sophisticated, you still have to seek out a specialty purveyor for certain ingredients—although now it’s not fresh ginger. Thanks to our digitally connected globe, a whole bunch of new specialty food suppliers have popped up, bringing obscure and premium ingredients to cooks.

We talked to a bunch of cookbook writers and chefs to find your new go-to products, including hand-milled South Carolina grits, Afghan saffron imported by military vets, and Szechuan peppercorns.

The word “mala” translates to numbing (ma) and spicy (la), one of the defining characteristics of Sichuan cuisine. And according to Chinese cookbook author Grace Young, The Mala Market, is the place for premium-grade Sichuan peppercorns—essential for a tongue-tingling mapo tofu—in the U.S. The online shop is an outgrowth of a food blog, called The Mala Project, started by former Wall Street Journal editor Taylor Holliday, who wanted to learn to cook for her daughter, Fong Chong, whom she adopted from China. They offer crazy good Sichuan peppercorns, which are complex, intense, and citrusy—as opposed to the bunk ones, which are bitter, not as aromatic, and lacking that crucial mouth-numbing quality. The Mala Market carries both red (hua jiao) and the more floral and piney green Sichuan peppercorns (qing hua jiao), as well as pantry staples and lesser known ingredients like preserved mustard stem (Yibin suimiyacai), used in dan dan noodles, and Pixian chili bean paste (doubanjiang), often found in stir-fries like twice-cooked pork.

Chef Ignacio Mattos, whose restaurant Estela was our #3 Best Restaurant in 2014, loves the small Bronx Italian importer, Gustiamo. “They have delicious canned tomatoes and their chickpeas are insane,” he says of a rich, nutty variety of dried chickpeas called sultana from Umbria. “They also have really special olive oils and bottarga that I love." Started in 1999 by Rome native Beatrice Ughhi, it specializes in meticulously sourced ingredients from small producers, like Nettuno’s colatura di alici, the Italian fish sauce made in the fishing village of Cetara on the Amalfi coast by pressing fresh anchovies with sea salt and aging them in chestnut-wood barrels. We like it drizzled over fried farro with pickled carrots and runny eggs.

Ana Sortun, chef-owner of Middle Eastern-inspired restaurants Oleana and Sarma in Cambridge, MA, says you won’t find better saffron than Rumi (Daniel Boulud is also a fan). The company was launched by three U.S. military veterans, who discovered that some of the world’s best saffron was growing in the province of Herat while deployed in Afghanistan. Far from the supermarket stuff, which is typically faked by dying crocus parts or corn silk red with food coloring, Rumi’s otherworldly earthy-floral saffron is the kind that meets its reputation for the world’s most expensive spice. Only three stigmas are in each flower and 150,000 blossoms are needed to produce one kilogram of saffron. In the early morning, women in the Herat, where the harsh climate produces a more intensely flavorful spice, hand-harvest the delicate purple crocuses. Fortunately, a tiny bit of the rusty-red stigmas goes a long way, whether you’re using it in savory dishes, like this herby rice, or lemon buttermilk pie with saffron.

Edoardo Jordan, chef-owner of Salare in Seattle, gets his small-batch white and yellow grits, Sea Island red peas, and benne seeds from Geechie Boy Mill for his new Southern-style restaurant, Junebaby. The South Carolina company is owned by Betsy and Greg Johnsman on Betsy’s family’s farm on Edisto Island. “You can taste the freshness in the product,” Jordan says of the grits. “They are clean, full of corn flavor, which you don’t normally get from commercial grits.” Greg started out using a 1945 grist mill that he restored on weekends and has since added four other antique mills to grind grits, cornmeal, and flour to order. Today, the couple offers five different kinds of grits, stone-ground from heirloom corn: yellow, white, blue, speckled, and Jimmy Red, a once nearly extinct corn now prized by Southern chefs. And this year, they will also add another forgotten variety, Guinea Flint corn, a variety they worked with Sean Brock on, to the lineup.

This macrobiotic food site has a wide variety of premium Japanese ingredients, mostly from the Ohsawa brand, and comes highly recommended by Nancy Singleton Hachisu, author of Preserving the Japanese Way. The stuff on Gold Mine is pure and artisanal. Hachisu is particularly a fan of the Ohsawa Yamaki miso and Ohsawa Yamaki soy sauce, made with natural spring water and fermented in cedar barrels for a minimum of two summers in the small mountain village of Kamiizumi. It’s almost impossible to find umeboshi (pickled plums) without harsh additives in the U.S., but the Ohsawa organic umeboshi is grown in volcanic soil on the Oindo family farm in Nara and has only three ingredients: plums, shiso, and sea salt. “The ume-related products, while pricey (and deservedly so), are absolute must-have treasures,” says Hachisu. “I visited one of the only two farmers producing organic ume-related products commercially and was totally blown away by the clarity of the umesu [plum vinegar], and the brightness of the ume pastes.”

“I love Reluctant Trading for its outstanding ground turmeric and Tellicherry peppercorns—best you can get,” says Bonnie Morales of Russian restaurant Kachka in Portland, Oregon. “The turmeric is smoky from the way they dry it over a fire. So complex.” The company started by selling plump, hand-picked Tellicherry peppercorns, and then expanded its offerings to outstanding chai (one of our picks for the best you can buy), coarse Icelandic sea salt, green and black cardamom pods, and striking Swedish-designed pepper mills made from porcelain and walnut wood.

In the hills of Monterey, Tennessee, the Guenther family of Muddy Pond Sorghum harvests sorghum cane, presses the juice from them, and then boils the juice over wood-fired steam to reduce it into thick, tangy-sweet syrup. Chefs Ryan Pera of Houston’s Coltivare and Edoardo Jordan of Seattle’s Junebaby both love the stuff. It is traditionally drizzled over biscuits, pancakes, and waffles or used as a sweetener for baked goods. Try it in this pecan butter from Sqirl's Jessica Koslow), or in this roast chicken with squash from Edmund's Oast in Charleston.

The man behind the Mexican food importer Masienda is Jorge Gaviria, a former Maialino line cook, who wanted to offer an heirloom alternative to the industrial corn, which dominates the U.S. market. “The black beans from Oaxaca we were using in the previous menu, were grown alongside the corn (olotillo blanco) that we also use for our masa,” says Rico Torres, who co-chefs Mixtli with Diego Galicia in San Antonio, Texas. The farmers producing the heirloom beans and corn for Masienda practice the traditional MesoAmerican way of farming, milpa, which rotates corn, beans, and squash on the same land. Masienda also partners with a third-generation Los Angeles tortilleria, La Princesita, for stone-ground heirloom corn tortillas that are a chef favorite.

For both Bonnie Morales of Portland, Oregon’s Kachka and Laurel Almerinda, director of bakery operations for the Rustic Canyon restaurant group in California, Mountain Rose Herbs is a savior for super obscure organic herbs and spices. Started by California herbalists, the company is now run out of Oregon and offers more than 200 different kinds of herbs and spices, as well seaweeds, seeds, cosmetic oils and clays, and “burnables” (yes, this is where you can also order a sage smudge stick). Their overwhelming selection make the grocery store spice rack look like child’s play, with everything from dried bilberry and bitter orange peel to standards like vanilla beans and bay leaves.

Twenty-five years ago, Belazu Ingredient Co. started out as the Fresh Olive Company before expanding their line to vinegars, argan oil, pomegranate molasses, and pastes, like zhoug, a spicy condiment from Yemen. Chef Cassie Piuma, co-owner with Ana Sortun at Cambridge’s Sarma, relies on Belazu for their expertly balanced rose petal harissa. While the cooks at Sarma make their own preserved Meyer lemons, Piuma also likes their version, which is made with the thin-skinned belazu lemons, as well their viscous Modena balsamic vinegar, nutty barley couscous, fired-roasted freekah, and smoked chile jelly. Contact Belazu directly for orders to the U.S.